CW: misogyny.
Most of us speak and eat/swallow without thinking about how complicated these processes actually are, how a single malfunction in the system can completely alter how we live or interact with others. A few years back, I accompanied an elderly family member to their first swallow test, and afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about tongues, how quickly we can lose control of it, and the doctor’s words: “Make sure you don’t gag or burp, you have to keep everything in or we won’t get a good image.” That was the starting point of this story.
You have trouble swallowing the pills. They’re big and round like red bullets, grazing the lining of your throat on their way down. You learned from your speech therapist, Ms. Laurie, that the older you get, the harder it is to swallow. The less your body wants to do it. Like an old, broken vacuum that expels more than it keeps in.
Ms. Laurie asks you to drink water from a tiny plastic cup as she studies the bobbing of your throat. You drink and watch her mouth, the way her words form into little insects and crawl out, down her starched white coat, across the hospital floor up onto the table, and into the open cup of applesauce.
She asks you to spoon the applesauce as she tells you about her children, the girl and boy who are just perfect. You don’t tell her how your own daughter never visits you anymore. How the insects bristle on their way down your throat with the sweet sauce. How this isn’t the first time you’ve swallowed something unpleasant like it was nothing. You remember the insects crawling out of your daughter’s black and blue eye, your fist pulsing. You’d swallowed them then too, and all the times after.
Ms. Laurie asks if you like the applesauce. You’re eating it so well, not like her kids. You’re so good at this. You swallow hard, the sharp bicycling insect legs, hundreds of them, sliding down. You’re worried they’ll march back up and out of your mouth, and what will the doctor, that Harvard-educated head of her department, think of you then?
The biscuits come next, perfect no-name-brand ovals like the kind they had at your retirement party, the kind no one ever eats unless there’s nothing else available. The kind your wife nibbled in the corner of the room as you ignored her in favor of the other guests. The insects crawled over her shaking fingers then, just as they crawl over yours now, clamoring for a spot in your mouth. You bite into one, the simultaneous crunch of the cookie and the exoskeleton. They crumble on your tongue like sand. You chew and swallow, mouthfuls of tiny sweet parts, and think of that time you went to Hawaii with the family, how everything still seemed okay then, but you’re not sure, your memory spotty. You still drank back then, alcohol so hard it burned down your throat like a tiny comet looking to wreck you, but you didn’t mind. You could beat anything if you wanted, chew up and swallow anyone who tried you.
“Two more,” Ms. Laurie instructs encouragingly, scribbling notes into her notepad. “You’re almost done.”
You pick up the next cookie. You bite-chew-swallow while you stare at the posters of anatomical cross sections behind her, the bulging eyes and long pink tube of the esophagus like the color of your daughter’s best friend’s dress senior year when you asked if she liked older men and the insects crawled out of your daughter’s red, shamed ears onto the floor of your car.
The lights in the office flicker. Ms. Laurie apologizes for the unreliable electricity. The building’s old. Some things just need a little retuning to work again. She jokes about her second husband’s obsession with HGTV and all those DIY shows, but you don’t get the joke; you don’t know the acronyms. You don’t know what it means to upcycle or why she keeps telling you about her family.
You pick up your third cookie like your third whiskey. You gobble it down. Most of the tiny insects have quieted now, subdued in your gut. You swallow the last few stragglers, imagining your wife on the beach, shoveling sand with your daughter, the grains a dirt-colored rain straining down through a plastic mesh board. Your daughter waves to you like a car wash balloon man. She’s saying something you can’t hear. She’s still young; she still believes in you. You can still feel the condensation from your glass dripping down your fingers. The throats in the posters undulate to the sound of the faucet as Ms. Laurie washes her hands for the fifth time.
“Are you okay?” she asks, but this is just a formality. This is not where you tell her about the sharp feeling in your gut, about all the times you’ve woken up in the middle of the night and listened to the sound of your own heartbeat in your throat. On a red-dust road, your own father told you a lifetime ago that a man doesn’t show strangers the mess in his own house. You swallow it down, you take it. A mosquito buzzed near your ear then, invisible but no less insistent in its hunger. You fought the urge to slap it off your skin—your father was speaking, his words commanding you into a statue. Your body was no more than bones and leathery skin then, a nodding corpse, and you wagered to yourself who would live longer, you or the insect feeding on you.
Ms. Laurie gives you a stick to press down on your tongue, to test the strength of the muscle. You press, but your tongue fights. It twists left and right like a snake. In the pit of your stomach, you feel movement. A wave of nausea washes over you like sudden rain, chilling your body. The dead insects, smothered in acid for years, twitch back to life in blacks and blues. You feel their tiny legs crawling, clawing their way back up. It’s only a matter of time. There will be so many of them, they’ll cover the floor, the walls, the posters, the steel lights, dig their way into Ms. Laurie’s keyboard, the open boxes of latex gloves and cupboards of vacuum-sealed metal tools. You won’t be able to stop them.
You press on the stick until it pokes the back of your throat. You fight the urge to gag. You’re unsure if the buzzing sound is coming from the walls or inside your bones. You try to swallow. But you already know, don’t you? A body can only swallow so much before it needs to expel.
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